No Laughing Matter

Roger Simon’s piece, “Porn Police Strike Up the Banned” (July 20), is the most appallingly insensitive and irresponsible bit of trash printed in the View section for the past 10 years. No doubt he thought he was being terribly witty by making fun of those people who believe there’s a link between certain types of pornography and violent crimes against women. No doubt he thinks that films showing women being tortured to death, raped, beaten senseless, and dismembered with everything from kitchen knives to hacksaws is just one more facet of a healthy society’s freedom of expression.

I suppose he also thinks that the psychologically unbalanced person who frequently goes to grin through a movie like that can really tell the difference, afterwards, from the actress in the movie and someone’s 16-year-old daughter who might be standing on a street corner, innocently waiting for a bus. Statistics state that the likelihood of a woman being raped in Los Angeles is one in three. With a reality like that, I don’t think that Roger Simon or anybody else has anything to laugh about.

JENNIE SCHAFFNER

Thousand Oaks